Saturday, May 2, 2009

Hi everyone, I've been churning out some concept art for the enemies. These are some different designs for the smallest enemy that the player will face. Currently the main difference between these enemies and the next level of enemies is their size and shape. The medium enemies will be larger and square. The hardest enemies will be circular, but much larger. These designs may and probably will change, but I think that we've established a good starting point for distinguishable differences between the enemies.

We had a pretty extensive meeting yesterday where we nailed down the concept for the game and the mechanics that we want to implement. I'm going to lay out the basics here for your perusal, but bear in mind that some of this may be subject to change, but I'm confident we can get everything we want in by the end of the month.

It's hard to define the exact genre of game ours is, but it most closely relates to a cross between Survival Lab and Rage 3. I'll break it down into the main components of the game.

A la Survival Lab, the whole game takes place in one level. It starts out just a simple floor and walls with three floating platforms. Enemies will spawn in over these walls in massive waves, dozens at a time. You have two ways of killing these enemies. First you have your trusty melee weapon, which at the beginning of the game will be a stick. Second, you have bombs, which when you start will be a simple 3-second timer bomb. To give you an idea of what this looks like on screen, I threw together a simple mock up of a screenshot in photoshop. Bear in mind this is not indicative of the look of the final project, but the scale and level design will remain relatively unchanged.

In between waves of enemies, you'll have the opportunity to choose a perk for your character OR get full health. Perks fall into 1 of 4 categories: Melee, Bomb, Maneuverability, or Misc. The melee perk is always a better weapon, going from your humble stick up to and through a lightsaber. Bomb perks will upgrade your bomb to have a wider radius, be a remote mine, place more at a time, that sort of thing. Maneuverability perks are things like increased speed and jumping. Misc. perks are just that, they can be anything from slow health regeneration to a damage aura.

In addition to the permanent perks you get between levels, there are also randomly spawning pick ups that give you a temporary (5-8 second) boost like invulnerability or super speed. The trick to these is that not only can you pick them up but so can certain types of enemies.

The last major element to the game is the environment. Where you start with a simple boxed in area and a few platforms, eventually the environment will shift during various waves. Platforms will crumble, lava will flood the first floor, enemies will spawn through doors on the sides instead of just over the top walls, etc. This not only keeps the player from getting bored with the waves, but will add extra challenge to the game.

The goal of the game is to get past 30 waves of enemies. Once you're able to do that, your secondary goal is a highscore. You get points for killing enemies and defeating waves quickly while conversely you lose points for taking damage or dying. Since we'll most likely be launching through Kongregate, we'll be able to use their API to keep track of players high scores and achievements.

That's all for now, we plan to have our Alpha done in a little over a week, we'll keep you posted as we get more done. I'll be nailing down the specifics of the perks and powerups system and working with Josh to nail down the aesthetics so expect to see more on that front soon.

Friday, May 1, 2009

Everyone at Boosh Studios is officially done with all of their classes now, meaning that summer vacation has begun. For us at Boosh Studios, that means development on our first (currently untitled) project has begun. We've set an incredibly ambitious scope for this game, but we're just crazy enough to pull this off.

This also means we'll have some real content to show off soon, as our game is scheduled to hit alpha in just a few weeks. Check back often to learn more about our first title and see some conceptual work.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

So we're posting our favorite flash games, I had a tough time narrowing this down but one game that I have consistently come back to is Dolphin Olympics 2 by Alan Rawkins. It sounds weird, I know, let me explain.

Dolphin Olympics 2 is one of those games that is so ridiculously simple but also so addictive, you have to keep coming back to it. You've got two minutes to do flips out of the water. Hitting rings gives you a boost of speed, and the more flips you do the more points you get. That's it.

In my opinion it really has a lot of what makes a great flash game. Intuitive, addictive, and easy to play in small doses. Once you play it once you'll play it again.

Important meeting today, determining what type of game we're going to make. Unless some other idea comes up, we like the idea of a single-screen fast-paced platforming action game. As soon as there are more details, we'll post them.

We were going to make more progress, but Desktop TD Pro just came out, so...

Monday, April 27, 2009

Since I didn't want to do any homework, I spent today building a basic rhythm game.

All it does is create dots on the right side of the screen and move them left. One dot is the target dot, and the rest have their alpha set at .5 to distinguish them. If an arrow key is pressed, it checks the target dot for two things: First to see if the key pressed is the same as on the dot, second to see if it's in the center circle. If both are true, it tells you that you were successful. Otherwise it tells you that you missed. In addition, if you fail to hit any keys before the target leaves the center circle, you miss. Either way, the next dot in line becomes the target.

It's interesting to make quickie prototypes like these, just to see what the different genres are like. The product was a weak DDR ripoff, but now when I come back to the genre in the future, I'll have a better knowledge base to work from, as well as some code I could probably steal.

I think my next quickie project will be a platformer. I haven't made one of those yet in Flash, and they can be tricky. I'll probably talk more about platformers later when we discuss game ideas, but the best platformers feel incredibly smooth, and that can be hard to do.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Let's post links to our favorite Flash games, and talk about them for a bit. I'll go first!

My pick is Sean Coopers Boxhead: The Zombie Wars. It's an action game from a isometric perspective, allowing players to wander around the map in two dimensions. Boxy zombies spawn from each side (based on the design of the map) that you can kill with a variety of weapons. Your selection of weapons is upgraded as you kill more zombies, but the zombies grow in quantity and complexity as the game goes on. Eventually the player is swarmed and dies, but not until a lot of zombie blood has been spilled.

What The Zombie Wars brings to the Boxhead franchise (which also contains the spectacular Boxhead: 2Play Rooms) is base building. Through a combination of explosive barrels, barricades and turrets, you can construct a base to help kill off zombies. This adds a new layer of strategy to the Boxhead games, making The Zombie Wars my favorite entry in the franchise.

Boxhead: The Zombie Wars is a wonderfully addictive game that combines visceral action with tactical know-how. A must-play for anyone who likes action games or zombies. And everyone likes zombies.

I'm a sophmore in the Art & Animation major at Champlain College. This major is a lot of fun, but also a lot of work. A majority of my time is spent doing 3D and 2D art. I LOVE Photoshop and learn new ways to use it all the time.

In what little spare time that I have I play guitar, watch movies, play table-top games, make table-top games, and go to whatever athletic outings my friends cook up. I like sci-fi movies. My favorite table-top games are Warhammer 40k and Warmachine. Oh yeah, and the one that Ray and I are making: Hypernova. I do Ultimate Frisbee too.

The most influential video game for me was probably GoldenEye 007. I remember playing this and thinking that games couldn't get any cooler or more realistic. Things have changed.

I'm from western New York, but my goal is to stay in Burlington for the summer. I'll hopefully be doing other art jobs to pay the rent while working for Boosh.

Saturday, April 25, 2009

Naturally, our programmer starts his post with "Hello world". I'm Ray, a founding member of Boosh Studios and resident snarky game designer.

I'm a sophomore at Champlain College like the rest of the bunch. I hail from Rhode Island, which is where I'll be spending the summer. Escaping to the beach and probably working at a crappy part time job when I'm not developing flash games.

Here at Boosh I'll be the Lead Designer and Producer for the first project at least, making sure everybody stays in line and that we have something to show. We'll be doing a one month production cycle and will have our first game out by the end of May, I promise.

In my spare time I play guitar, do tabletop gaming like Warhammer 40k and Warmachine, and play video games (naturally). I come from a strong first person shooter background, being born and raised on Doom and Half-Life, but I'll play just about anything. Lately I've been playing a lot of Left4Dead and sizing up the competition over on Kongregate.

If you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason feel free to drop me an email at ray.ortgiesen-at-gmail.com. Until next time, happy gaming!

Hello, world. I'm Mark D. and I'm one of the founding members of Boosh Studios.

I am a sophomore in the Electronic Game Design major at Champlain College in Burlington, VT. I'm from, and I'll be spending the summer in, Londonderry, NH.

In Boosh Studios I'll be working as the lead programmer/engineer for our upcoming Flash game. I have only about a month's experience working in ActionScript, but I have a background in Java and C++.

In my free time I watch a lot of television and screw around online. I'm loving Breaking Bad these days, and highly recommend it to anyone. I haven't been gaming as much as I'd like, but I still hit up the casual round of DotA once in a while. I also finally got my fists on the Phoenix Wright games, which are fantastic.

Um, so, that's all I have. If you want to contact me for business reasons, my e-mail is markldesmarais-at-gmail.com. If you just want to chat, you can get me on AIM at RdArrogantKnight, and my casual e-mail is redarrogantknight-at-gmail.com. I often play on Kongregate, where I go by Malky. Feel free to send me a message anytime!

Mark Desmarais - Our lead engineer and writer, he'll be making the games go.

Raymond Ortgiesen - Our lead designer and producer, he'll be in charge of PR, distribution, and making sure the rest of us stay in line.

Joshua Terry - Our lead artist, he's got mad skillz. He'll be making our games look like they aren't all populated by stick figures. (Unless our first game is a stick figure game, in which case he'll draw the best stick figures in town.)

We are all currently sophomore students at Champlain College, where we are studying Electronic Game Design. We're hoping to release our first game in the first half of the summer of 2009. In the meantime, check by here often, as we explain our design process, the difficulties of starting an amateur Flash studio, and anything else on our minds.

If you have any thoughts, questions, ideas, or just want to chat, send an e-mail to booshstudios-at-gmail.com.

About Boosh Studios

We're a team of amateur game developers studying at Champlain College. Our team consists of Mark D., Ray Ortgiesen and Josh Terry, and we're looking to develop Flash games for online distribution. Our first release is currently projected for the end of May.